This Is So Disturbing This was reported in our local newspaper and I am just sick thinking of this cruelty. God Bless America! China kills 50,000 dogs in rabies crackdown By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN Associated Press 8/2/2006 SHANGHAI, China - China slaughtered 50,000 dogs in a government-ordered crackdown after three people died of rabies, sparking unusually pointed criticism in state media Tuesday and an outcry from animal rights activists. Health experts said the brutal policy pointed to deep weaknesses in the health care infrastructure in China, where only 3 percent of dogs are vaccinated against rabies and more than 2,000 people die of the disease every year. The five-day slaughter in Mouding County, Yunnan Province, southwestern China, ended Sunday and spared only military guard dogs and police canine units, state media reported. Dogs being walked were seized from their owners and beaten to death, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported. Led by the county police chief, killing teams entered villages at night creating noise to get dogs barking, then beat the animals to death, the reports said. Owners were offered 63 cents per animal to kill their own dogs before the teams were sent in, they said. The killings were widely discussed on the Internet, with legal scholars and animal rights activists criticizing them as crude and coldblooded. The official newspaper Legal Daily criticized the killings as an "extraordinarily crude, coldblooded and lazy way for the government to deal with epidemic disease." "Wiping out the dogs shows these government officials didn't do their jobs right in protecting people from rabies in the first place," the newspaper, published by the central government's Politics and Law Committee, said in an editorial in its online edition. In an editorial, the official Xinhua News Agency said the killings would not have been necessary if the local government had been more attentive, but it called the slaughter "the only way out of a bad situation." "If they'd discovered this earlier, they could have vaccinated the dogs and . . . controlled the outbreak," the editorial said. The killings prompted calls for a boycott of Chinese products from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. "We are urging everyone to actively boycott - not a word we use lightly - anything from China, given the bludgeoning killing of thousands of dogs," PETA President Ingrid Newkirk said, adding that the group had canceled all orders of China-made goods that it sells. Mouding County officials defended the slaughter in a region where about 360 of the 200,000 residents suffered dog bites this year, with three people reportedly dying of rabies, including a 4-year-old girl. "With the aim to keep this horrible disease from people, we decided to kill the dogs," Li Haibo, a spokesman for the county government, was quoted as saying by Xinhua. |
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